So I decided to put together a monitoring system. It will monitor my sump pump, letting me know when it is getting used hard so I know to pay it more attention. It will monitor my Aquaponics grow bed, telling me when my flood and drain / ebb & flow grow bed isn’t functioning correctly. It will also monitor my fish tank water levels and let me know when the water is getting low, or more importantly when I am filling it and it gets to where it ought to be.

This is put together with Raspberry Pis. An older original B model for the fish tank because I have it and it’s close enough to Ethernet that I can run a wire to it. The Sump Pump is getting a Zero W as it is further away, and I needed to buy something and it was the cheapest option ($10).

I am measuring water height by 2 methods. An ultrasonic distance meter and a differential pressure setup.

I coded up the project a couple of different ways, learning as I went along. I ended up starting with the hardest methods first, and moving towards easier methods. Starting at OS level triggering of shell scripts, moving through python programming, and finally landed on Node Red. I am happy for the path I took as I now have a solid understanding of what a Raspberry Pi can do for me and how to control it at multiple levels. Node Red is how I will be building most of my projects going forward as it’s easier for the kids to understand.

Node Red

Node Red is a graphical programming environment that you use with a web browser. This means a quick tweak can be made from your cell phone! Not the best experience, a cell phone, but doable.

The core concept of Node Red, is you drag ‘nodes’ or blocks onto your screen and set them up with the particular details that node needs. Configuration settings such as the specific pins on the raspberry pi you have a sensor plugged into, a login for an online service, etc.

You then connect the different ‘nodes’ together with lines, and the whole thing just starts working. Amazing, really.

You program a computer using the same methods you would use to explain a process to another person. Draw a bunch of boxes saying this box does this thing, and connect the various boxes together with lines showing how different events are chained together.

When you use the Node Red menu in the Raspberry Pi, it opens up a text window, with a bunch of stuff on the screen. In amongst that text, is instructions on how to set Node Red up to turn itself on automatically when the Pi starts. Now you have automatic monitoring even if the power goes out and comes back on.

Direct reading of water level via sonar

Ultrasonic distance meters turn to out to measure the distance to a water surface fairly well. The water needs to be reasonably flat & calm for it to work reliably. The thing basically beeps at a high enough frequency that we can’t hear it, and listens to see how long until it hears it’s echo back. A little bit of math, which computers happen to be good at, and you have a distance measurement!

I picked up a bunch of HC-SR04 sensors for cheap from eBay. You can get them from reputable sources for around $5 each.

The HC-SR04 sensor tutorial I followed when writing code is found at https://www.modmypi.com/blog/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-sensor-on-the-raspberry-pi

If you want to learn about all of this, it is good to work through the tutorial. I ended up dropping the tutorial method and used Node Red.

HC-SR04 Node Red sensor, calibration, and logging flow.

Node Red needs an add-on node to ‘talk’ to the sensor. The one I found is https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-node-pisrf . Install it according to the instructions, restart Node Red (or the Raspberry Pi if you haven’t figured out how to restart Node Red) and reload your browser window for it, and you can now start taking distance measurements.

Differential Pressure water level method

Have you ever noticed that if you hold your finger over the end of a straw, stick it in your glass, the water goes up the straw only a little bit? When you do that, you are increasing the air pressure inside the straw.

If you compare that air pressure inside the straw, to the air pressure outside the straw, you are working with differential pressure. We can use this to simply see the cycle of water rising and falling, or calculate the actual height of the water inside the pipe. I don’t know what physics principle to use to do the math for calculating actual water height.

I used a BMP280 temperature and pressure sensor. The adafruit library didn’t work well for me. I did however find https://github.com/ControlEverythingCommunity/BMP280/blob/master/Python/BMP280.py which worked well.

The Node Red library has a bug in it at the moment. When you try to use it with the BMP280 module, it crashes Node Red. If you see this happen, the fix is simple, you need to call in the bigNumbers.js library in the right spot. Once you do this, things work correctly.

The BMP280 had some issues with longish wires. I ended up using some Cat5 with the tip from https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=82049 for how to pick the wires to get the best performance. This worked well, if a bit time consuming to pigtail the doubled up wires so I only had 1 wire to solder onto the printed circuit boards.

Seeing the data

I logged the data to io.adafruit.com using MQTT. The library I used is found at https://github.com/adafruit/io-client-python for coding things the hard way. Node Red has a built in MQTT node as well.

I used Adafruit’s IO tool because it’s cheap (free) and easy, and is great for learning how to do all of this. There are other options available from Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, and many many more. Adafruit’s tool is great to start out with.

Sensor readings in a Bell Auto Siphon Fail to Break mode. The ‘gap’ in the middle of the chart is from the auto-siphon failing to break siphon. We see it in both the upper graph measuring the actual water height plus the lower graph measuring the pressure elevation in the stand pipe.

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I tried making a water block for water cooling my MakerGear hot end this weekend.

I failed. kinda…

A bit of background as to WHY I would want to do such a project can be found at http://mike.creuzer.com/2013/01/watercooling-my-makergear-prusa-reprap.html I wanted to improve over the coil of copper being that I am about to re-install my 1.75mm hot end for a few lbs of plastic. Going to try ABS for the first time at this size. Not sure if I am going to have problems with that or not.

My fail is I was too lazy to go out into the cold to drill a hole on the drill press. I managed to salvage my stupid hole with a bit of tubing. Hopefully it doesn't cost me too much in efficiency.

I really have no idea what I am doing when it comes to using a lathe. Learning from YouTube is difficult as many of the videos posted are by people with as much experience as me (about 3 hours at this point).

Well, the next iteration should be better, right? I enjoyed making this enough I wouldn't mind making it again. But with a drill press. I think I will drill that hole first so I know it's right.

Using my UNiMAT lathe to fix my lousy hack saw cut and bring the aluminum block down to the right dimensions.

I turned down the black insulator a bit as I don’t have metric drill bits. The bigger tube is to couple airline tubing together on the OUTSIDE so I don’t get even more restrictions of water flow.

THERE I FIXED IT. I ran a bit of aquarium air hose through the buggered up hole. I am going to lose a lot of heat removal capability, but it lets me temporarily salvage this part. The water going through is in it’s mid 60s, so there is going to be a big difference, so it should pull heat well.

Until I make a new one.

I cut a piece of aluminium in half with a hack saw. The tray did a decent job of collecting the aluminum dust. Terrible surface finish on the cut. I did not do a good job of making the cut straight.

I tried drilling the hole using a hand drill because it’s COLD out in the garage where my drill press is.

I FAILED. I totally didn’t get things where they wanted to go. I’ve a hole on the inside, and a double hole on one end.

I can JUST snap the wooden clip in place with the water block installed. It’s going to be a royal pain to un-clip it.

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The mirror print bed broke when I tried to heat the bed up to ABS temps. It looks like a 2nd temp sensor is just a touch high and created a stress point. PLA temps didn't cause any problems with it.

One thing I noticed is when I used just the shard of mirror, the temperature quickly climbed that last 10 degrees. The temperature sensor was no longer under the mirror. The mirror must be radiating heat faster than the plain PCB board? Anybody have any science on this?

I put 2 pieces of tape down to hold some heat around the part as the printer is out in the open in my cold basement. I got a lot less lifting printing straight to glass with a bit of hairspray than I expected.

Broken bits of my print surface laying on the edge of the aquarium next to my printer. It’s a cheap IKEA mirror tile, so I will cut another and edge it this time. I also will adjust the sensor that the glass broke over.

Printing on a shard of my broken bed. The blue tape is to create a warm pocket of air to reduce ABS curl.

This part lifted surprisingly little for it’s shape & printing in an open basement. Less than a mm lift that worked back less than a cm. First print with the ABS after switching from PLA, so I am sure the first few layers where contaminated with PLA and I didn’t have the temps tuned right for clean printing.

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I am trying to find a cheaper way to heat the 75 gallon aquaponics system in the basement. It's really running closer to 125 gallons of water with a LOT of surface area. This bleeds heat quite quickly, so the electric submersion heaters are expensive to run and I simply don't have enough to keep up with the cold basement sucking the heat out of my tanks.

So, I did something stupid. I rigged up a water line to the furnace and water heater flue. This involved running about 25 feet of 1/4 inch tubing because that's all I had on hand that would go the distance. There are issues with copper being toxic to fish, and cooling the flue, causing Carbon Monoxide to fill the house. So this is not something you want to do yourself.

I needed more water flow. A 3/4 inch pond pump forced down to 1/4 hose just doesn't work very well. Too much restriction to get good flow.

I had to make a water tipper to help my grow bed siphon start and stop. This just fills up with water slowly and then dumps the water at once into the bed. The small water pulse surge is often enough to trigger a slow siphon.

This is fine and dandy, but I have a 3d printer. So I spent some time with a Fluid Dynamics textbook and openscad and came up with an adapter for running multiple hoses out of my pump – http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:54029

I think it's a first. I haven't found anybody else who made a laminar flow reducer for a pond pump. This thing induces laminar water flow through a series of small honeycomb shaped features inside the adapter.

It was very challenging for me to make, as my math skills aren't up to par. I kinda had to trial and error it instead of solving the problem with math.

In the end, it's designed to be printed, with a center support column running up the center to make the upper section easy to print.

The best part is that the goofy thing works!. I get the same water flow out of the heater line as before PLUS I get 2 additional water lines that are providing a significant additional water flow. I'd expect it to work poorly do to all the plastic that's in the water flow, but it seems to be efficient enough to overcome all the extra gunk in the way.

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I’ve been fighting with printing 1.75mm PLA. The thicker brass in the hot end causes the heat to creep up more and make the ‘melt zone’ so long and sticky that the printer jams up. The normal ‘fix’ is to have a small fan blow up into the hot end insulator – the black plastic bit.

This sucks for me. The fans fail – stop spinning, fall apart, etc. The wires pop loose, touch each other, and short out the power mosfet on the RAMPS board. The fan falls down, hits the part, knocks it loose or causes the carriage to skip.

(Stereoscopic images, look at them cross-eyed if you want to see them in 3d)

The parts I got for water cooling my RepRap hot end. A bit of soft copper tubing and some hose.

I cut some tubing with a pipe cutter. I just kinda guessed how long it should be by wrapping my finger around the hot end and cutting the pipe at the length that seemed nice.I deburred the copper tubing with a countersink. The cutter gives me a nice outside edge to slip the tubing over. I wanted a clean inside edge for the water flow.I bent the tube over a screwdriver. I was going to fill the tube with sand so it didn’t kink, but I just started bending and it went around without kinking. I was also thinking of sliding some flat metal inside and hammering it down before it bent, but the bend just kinda happened successfully.I bent the tube around the hotend. I used the pliers to snug up the bend. It’s not really tight, and I wish I had some heat sink compound to help improve the contact between the two surfaces.The ‘wide’ side of the tubing wrap is taking up nearly all the space available along the hot end insulator.I measured out a bit of tubing, cut it off, and slid it onto the copper tubing.I think that the water cooled hot end looks pretty good.I slid a thermistor between the hot end and the water jacket so I can measure the effectiveness of the water cooling.

The task of installing all of this was almost challenging. There was just enough room to be able to slide the hot end up through the carriage, slip on the groove mount, and get it all positioned. The one bolt hole was kinda hiding above the copper tube, but the tube can be spun around a bit so everything can be bolted up snug.

Here is the water cooled hot end installed onto the X carriage. You are seeing most of it in the reflection of the mirrored print bed.Here we are looking up at the hot end water line routing. Also note the drilled holes in the binder clip. This takes a lot of the strength out of the clip so it’s less likely to break the glass or jump off the print bed and land on the far side of the room.Here is the water pump in the aquarium. Just straight fish-poo water. It’s not touching the printer, I am not worried about it. More concerned about the toxicity of the copper to the fish than the toxicity of the fish to the printer.Here is my RepRap 3D printer next to the aquarium that is cooling it. Or is this a photo of my aquarium with the overly expensive electric water heater that happens to print plastic parts? Hard telling…I ran the water and electric wire routing next to each other. The water and thermistor are not part of the ‘main’ wiring harness as I switch between 3mm and 1.75mm nozzles.Note the pretty hard bend in the plastic hose. If it’s less than this, it hits the mount for the X end stop.The water flow through the hot-end is pretty good using the tiny pump I have. I am not seeing a significant difference in temperature from the tank temp to the water from the hot end cooler.

The whole assembly was pretty quick and easy. When I installed the water cooling, I also incorporated the temperature monitoring and soldered the USB cable to the arduino board as the USB-B port got sloppy and would disconnect on me mid-print.

As for some numbers as to how well this works. With no water running through the copper tubing, I am seeing temperatures over 135f after 10 minutes. Yeah, Yeah, I know, RepRaps are metric, but it’s an easy value to convert, go too it. With water running, the top temp I’ve seen is 115f. It likes to run closer to 100-110f. My longest print so far is close to 4 hours without any problems. Without any cooling (and the copper not installed) I’d start to see jamming problems around 1 hour at .1mm layer height. .3mm layer heights would go much longer without problems. I am guessing that the plastic flow volume keeps pushing the heat down the barrel and doesn’t let the transition zone get too long.

I’ve not weighed the copper, tubing and water to see how much extra this weighs over the fan and mounting hardware.

I may run the water around the extruder, X and Y motors to help cool those. Not that they get hot really.

I think I want to mount some SMD LEDs against the tubing for some neat lighting effects. Just so it looks cool.